Tag Archives: parliamentarism

Steffen Ganghof has recently introduced the concept of semi-parliamentarism. For him, parliamentarism is where all the directly elected chambers of the legislature (whether one or two) have the constitutional right to hold the government collectively responsible, whereas semi-parliamentarism is where only one of the directly elected chambers of the legislature can do so. In other words, under semi-parliamentarism there are two directly elected chambers, but one of them (usually the upper house) does not play a part in the collective responsibility of the PM and cabinet. There are currently two semi-parliamentary countries in the world – Australia and Japan.

I like this definition. It allows us to reliably classify a set of countries merely by applying certain rules to publicly available constitutional information.

Two points. First, I understand why Steffen wants to identify semi-parliamentarism as a separate category, but I wonder if it might not be better to think of it as a sub-category of parliamentarism. This allows us still to see the interesting constitutional feature of the Australian and Japanese cases without losing sight of the basic feature of parliamentarism in both, namely the government’s survival in office is not separate from the legislature. If so, we might think of Australia and Japan as being semi-parliamentary parliamentary regimes. (That is not a typo).

Second, it raises the question of how many consequential classificatory clauses we should include when defining regimes. If we stick to the separate origin and survival of the executive and legislature, we get the three standard categories (presidentialism, semi-presidentialism and parliamentarism). We’ve now added a semi-parliamentary clause. Yet, the semi-parliamentary clause also applies to semi-presidential regimes too. So, the Czech Republic could be classed as a semi-parliamentary semi-presidential regime. Actually, though, we might think of the Czech Republic as a semi-parliamentary premier-presidential semi-presidential regime (i.e. a semi-parliamentary sub-type of the premier-presidential sub-type of semi-presidentialism). We could go further still. There are currently only two semi-parliamentary regimes in the world, but there is a potentially important classificatory difference between them. In Japan, the lower house of the legislature can be dissolved early but the upper house cannot, whereas in Australia there can be a double dissolution of the two houses. So – and bear with me – let’s add a classificatory clause and label Japan a semi-fixed regime and Australia a flexible regime. If so, then Japan would be a semi-fixed semi-parliamentary regime or, perhaps, a semi-fixed semi-parliamentary parliamentary regime. Accordingly, the Czech Republic would be a semi-fixed semi-parliamentary premier-presidential semi-presidential regime.

There is a beautifully Linnaean aspect to this exercise that I find extremely attractive. The classification of the Czech Republic as a semi-fixed semi-parliamentary premier-presidential semi-presidential regime is reliable. It is based merely on the application of certain rules to publicly available constitutional information. There’s another aspect to this Linnaean-type classificatory exercise that could also be attractive. It’s not impossible to think that it might have empirical implications. Perhaps the Czech Republic’s combination of constitutional features is consequential relative to countries with a different combination of features. We would need some theories to tell us what we might expect from any particular combination relative to others. But we might end up with some hypotheses that could be empirically tested.

That said, I doubt that the classification of the Czech Republic as a semi-fixed semi-parliamentary premier-presidential semi-presidential regime is going to catch on very soon. More than that, there is no particular reason why we could not add other classificatory clauses too. Last week, I discussed the addition of a super-majority clause to constitutional classifications. It would be easy to think of other clauses that could be added. However, by the time we combine classificatory clauses, we can quickly end up with very small numbers of real-world examples. The number of semi-parliamentary parliamentary regimes in the world is already only two. The number of semi-fixed (and fixed) semi-parliamentary regimes in the world is just one. The number of semi-fixed semi-parliamentary premier-presidential semi-presidential regimes is also only one (I think). This is not empirically helpful.

The only way to reliably classify regimes is through the application of certain rules to publicly available constitutional information. Only by doing so can we avoid subjective, contestable, sometimes even esoteric country classifications. For sure, if we rely on only a small number of classificatory clauses, the resulting regimes can include a very heterogenous set of countries that render empirical application problematic. However, if we add more clauses, then we have a more homogenous set of countries in each category, but we can very quickly end up with the n = 1 problem that also renders empirical application problematic.

To me, the solution is to accept that there is a basic Linnaean-like classificatory exercise. This exercise is purely taxonomic. It does not necessarily generate categories that are empirically useful, but then that is not its purpose. This is how ‘Duverger’ problem was solved 20 years ago when it came to defining semi-presidentialism. It is also to accept, though, that there is a separate empirical exercise. Here, we need to be pragmatic. Sometimes, the Linnaean-like classificatory categories may be useful empirically, but sometimes they may not. So, we have theories whereby it can still make sense for us to compare the effects of presidentialism relative to parliamentarism, as well as premier-presidentialism relative to president-parliamentarism. However, I cannot imagine a theory whereby it would make sense for us to compare the effects of the heterogenous set of semi-presidential countries relative to anything else. Equally, comparing the effects of semi-parliamentary countries relative to others is problematic when currently the n = only 2. That said, we can, for example, compare the effects of semi-presidentialism relative to parliamentarism conditional upon some measure of presidential power. This condition allows us to disaggregate the heterogenous set of semi-presidential countries in a way that doesn’t undermine the Linnaean-Like classificatory exercise and that could still be empirically useful. By the same token, we can certainly have theories that tell us what the relative effect of semi-parliamentarism might be, even if the number of cases is currently so small that valid conclusions about those effects are difficult to reach.

In a recent post, I linked to a new time-series, cross-sectional dataset on semi-presidentialism. The dataset provides an annual, cross-national coding of semi-presidential countries since 1900. V2.0 is available here.

The dataset contains two codings of semi-presidentialism. One conforms to – let’s call it – the standard definition. Here, semi-presidentialism is where the constitution provides for a directly (or popularly) elected president and a prime minister and cabinet that are collectively responsible to the legislature. The other adds another clause. Here, semi-presidentialism is where the constitution provides for a directly (or popularly) elected president and a prime minister and cabinet that are collectively responsible to the legislature other than by a super-majority vote. The second coding was added to V1.0 along with codings for countries that conform to – let’s call them – the standard definitions of premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism plus countries that confirm to those definitions with the addition of an equivalent super-majority clause.

Where does the need for a coding that includes a super-majority clause come from? I have been aware for some time that Samuels and Shugart (2010, p. 30, fn 4) excluded countries, such as Madagascar, from their list of semi-presidential regimes because of the introduction in the Constitution at a certain time of a super-majority requirement. In fact, they classed Madagascar as presidential for this reason (e.g. ibid. p. 33 and p. 258). Yet, I don’t remember seeing any definition of semi-presidentialism that explicitly includes this clause. Also, as far as I am aware, it isn’t part of any formal definition of the concept that Samuels and Shugart provide and the equivalent clause isn’t included in their (or Shugart and Carey’s) definition of premier-presidentialism or president-parliamentarism. So, it seems to be post-definitional add-on, or an implicit assumption of the formal definition.

In one sense, I’m indifferent as to whether a super-majority clause should be included as part of the definition of semi-presidentialism, because even if it is included it still allows for the reliable classification of countries. No expert knowledge is needed to determine whether a country should be classed as semi-presidential or not. We just need to apply certain rules to publicly available constitutional information. This reliability is the most important part of the classification process.

Three points, though. First, if it is to be operationalised, then I think the clause should be stated as part of the definition. If it isn’t stated, then for me semi-presidentialism still includes countries with a super-majority requirement. If it is stated, then it obviously excludes them. In other words, we should avoid post-definitional add-ons or implicit definitional assumptions.

Second, I think it is still better to class countries with a super-majority requirement as semi-presidential (or as a sub-category of semi-presidentialism) rather as presidential. After all, the constitution does still allow the legislature to bring down the government, whereas under presidentialism, by definition, it does not. Sure, it might take an extraordinary and almost unimaginable set of circumstances for, say, a two-thirds majority to come together and bring a government down, but constitutionally it could happen. (Think how opposing parties can vote together to end a nominally fixed-term legislature). In other words, whether or not it happens is a matter of politics not the constitution. If we are classing countries on the basis of constitutions, which is the only reliable way of doing so, then surely it is better to think of a country with a super-majority clause as being semi-presidential not presidential? The survival of one part of the executive is still not separate from the legislature.

Third, a super-majority requirement has implications for the classification of parliamentary regimes too. Maybe there are no examples, but what if there was a super-majority clause in a nominally parliamentary regime? For me, this would still make the country with such a clause parliamentary, although we might want to think about classifying the country as a sub-category of parliamentarism. Whatever the choice, I would be wary of classifying that country as presidential.

This is all very nerdy. But why stop there? Next week, I am going to discuss the classificatory implications of introducing other clauses.

This is a guest post by Thomas Sedelius, Dalarna University, and Jonas Linde, University of Bergen. It is a summary of their co-authored article that was recently published in Democratization. The full text article is free to download here.

Do semi-presidential regimes perform worse than other regime types? Following the classical argument once raised by Juan J. Linz (1990; 1994) that presidentialism and semi-presidentialism are less conducive to democracy than parliamentarism, a number of studies have empirically analysed the functioning and performance of semi-presidentialism. With the notable exception of Elgie (2011), however, there is a lack of large-N studies where democracy and government performance are actually measured across the two subtypes of semi-presidentialism (premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes). Robert Elgie’s systematic and comprehensive study offers several important findings on the performance of two types of semi-presidentialism, but it does so in isolation from parliamentary and presidential regimes. Our study is an attempt to address this gap in the literature.

By using indicators on regime performance and democracy from a dataset containing 173 countries, we examine the performance records of premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes in relation to parliamentarism and presidentialism.

Guided by Linz’s argument on the “perils of presidentialism”, and by Matthew S. Shugart and John M. Carey’s (1992) proposition that president-parliamentary regimes are more perilous to democracy than other regime types, we test three basic hypotheses.

H1: Parliamentarism performs better than other regime types in terms of democracy and government performance.

H2: Premier-presidentialism performs better than president-parliamentarism and presidentialism in terms of democracy and government performance.

H3: President-parliamentarism performs on a par with, or worse, than presidentialism in terms of democracy and government performance.

For measuring democracy, we select four frequently used indicators: Freedom House’s index of civil liberties and political rights and Polity IV combined, Polity IV on its own, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy, and the Executive Constraints indicator from Polity IV, which refers to the extent of institutionalized constraints on the decision-making powers of chief executives. For measuring government performance, we use the Government Effectiveness indicator from the Worldwide Governance Indicators, the Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, the Empowerment Rights Index from CIRI Human Rights Data Project, and the Human Development Index from UNDP.

Following a series of descriptive reports, we run some basic multivariate analyses with a conventional set of controls including GDP/capita, population size, ethnic fractionalization, proportional representation, and different world regions.

Overall, our findings do not support the proposition that parliamentarism performs better than all other regime types in terms of democracy and government performance (H1). Rather we observed a pattern where premier-presidentialism performs almost as good – and on some measures even better – as parliamentary regimes. Neither the measures of democracy nor the measures of government performance show significantly better records for parliamentary regimes than for premier-presidential ones. This indicates that a parliamentary constitution with an indirectly elected president does not necessarily go along with better political performance than a premier-presidential one with a popularly elected but weak or medium weak president. Thus, to the extent that we think about semi-presidentialism in terms of premier-presidential regimes, we have reasons to question strong propositions about the “perils of semi-presidentialism”.

However, the picture certainly looks different with regard to president-parliamentary regimes. While premier-presidential regimes are closer to parliamentary regimes, president-parliamentary regimes display performance records more similar to pure presidentialism, and it performs even worse on most indicators (H2, H3). When it comes to the level of democracy, the only regime type to perform significantly worse than the parliamentary one – on four separate measures and with conventional controls – is the president-parliamentary regime type. The differences in terms of government performance are less pronounced. Although there is a tendency of slightly poorer performance by presidential-parliamentary regimes also in terms of government performance, and significantly so on one indicator, our results demonstrate that the type of constitutional system seems to affect democracy more strongly than government performance.

Shugart and Carey’s general recommendation to stay away from the president-parliamentary form of government certainly finds support in our data. In our study, we mostly refrain from making claims about causal mechanisms behind the observed pattern. However, we allow some general comments on the importance of presidential powers in relation to the four regime types. We show how variation in presidential powers follow closely the four regime types – weakest among the parliamentary regimes and strongest among the president-parliamentary regimes. We know that case studies on e.g. post-Soviet countries where the system has shifted from president-parliamentary to premier-presidential constitutions provide additional support to the negative impact of president-parliamentarism on democracy. For instance, Elgie and Moestrup (2016) show that reduced presidential powers and a shift to a more balanced semi-presidential system have been associated with better democracy records in e.g. Armenia, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. A general trend among the post-Soviet countries is that the presidents have used their control over the administration to curb the opposition and thereby directing the trajectory of constitutional developments in their own favor. The outcome has been increased power of already powerful presidents – a straight road to the consolidation of autocracy.

Our study is limited to the extent that it draws on cross-sectional data only, and we acknowledge the need for more sophisticated analyses. In addition, the study can make no valid claims of having disentangled endogeneity challenges regarding institutions and political outcomes. Yet, we reveal a general pattern with regard to the four regime types on performance. Based on our findings, we claim that democratic performance is likely to be better with a parliamentary or premier-presidential form of government. If the most positive accounts about semi-presidentialism are relevant, such as executive flexibility, power-sharing, and a uniting president, those are most likely to be identified under the premier-presidential form of government. Our data give no support for general recommendations to avoid dual executives or popularly elected president with limited powers.

Finally, and well in line with more recent scholarship, we argue that discussions about the pros and cons of semi-presidentialism should include the distinction between its sub-categories as well as considering dimensions of presidential power.

Thomas Sedelius is Associate Professor in Political Science at Dalarna University, Sweden. His research covers semi-presidentialism, political institutions, transition, democratisation, and East European politics. His work on semi-presidentialism has appeared in journals such as Democratization, Government and Opposition, and East European Politics, and also include The Tug-of-War between Presidents and Prime Ministers: Semi-Presidentialism in Central and Eastern Europe (Örebro Studies, 2006). Thomas currently leads a research project (2015-2018) financed by the Swedish Research Council on semi-presidentialism and governability in transitional countries.

Jonas Linde is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Norway. His research has dealt with different aspects of political support, perceptions of corruption, quality of government, e-government and post-communist democratization. Linde’s works have been published in journals such as Governance, European Journal of Political Research, International Political Science Review, Political Studies, Government Information Quarterly and Government and Opposition.

This is a guest post by Professor Jean Blondel, Professor Emeritus, EUI, Florence

In the course of the last few years, I became increasingly concerned with the apparent contradiction between the rapid development of regimes in which the role of the president is dominant and the impression that these regimes were at least very often giving way, at any rate temporarily, to what is conventionally regarded as ‘usurpation’. The ‘presidential republics’ which had emerged in the newly independent Spanish American countries in the first decade of the nineteenth century could be regarded as providing evidence for the view which was put forward by Linz and Valenzuala in 1994 in their two volume study, namely that, on the whole, ‘presidential democracy’ was a ‘failure’. The case of France’s ‘Second Republic’ of 1848-51 was also an example of such a ‘failure’ as the model was the America: thus only the successful duration of the US Constitution of 1787-9 made it impossible to adopt such a view as a ‘universal’ proposition. As a matter of fact, the fate of subsequent ‘presidential experiments’ in Europe in the interwar period seemed to confirm the validity of ‘pessimistic’ views, Finland having been the only European exception among them.

Yet this state of affairs did not prevent the multiplication of ‘presidential republics’ in Africa from the late 1950s to the 1970s and beyond; there was more reluctance in Asia and indeed in Europe as well, except for the fact that Gaullist France, alone in Western Europe, adopted presidentialism in 1958-62. Indeed, in the 1990s, a further boost for the model of the ‘presidential republic’ resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Yeltsin adopted the ‘model’ for the new Russia he created, a move which was closely followed by ten of the other eleven ex ’Soviet’ republics which did not join the European Union in 2004. A majority of the countries of the world had come to be presidential as a result (see Table 1 below)!

Table 1

World regimes in 2013 (countries of 100,000 inhabitants or more only)

Region

Total

Pres

Parl. Rep

Monarchies

Usurp

Communist

Decentralised

Unclassified

West/W. Europe

23

2

9

11

1

E. Europe in EU

11

2

9

E. Europe not in EU

7

3

3

1

Asia

39

11

10

13

1

3

1

Pacific

7

2

3

1

1

Africa

53

45

2

3

3

Amer. (not West)

30

21

1

7

1

Ex Soviet Union

11

11

Total

181

95

36

37

2

4

3

4

Details are given in the volume about the regimes adopted by individual countries in the various parts of the globe.

Even if many of the countries concerned (except in Europe) were affected by ‘coups’, the fact that the ‘presidential idea’ had spread so widely in the twentieth century in particular suggested that, on the basis of what had been truly an institutional ‘invention’ in the United States in 1789, a new ‘constitutional’ formula was being adopted in a context in which ‘new’ countries emerging from colonialism, with difficulty, admittedly, but with also some successes, particularly over time, as Latin American experience seemed to be showing especially from the 1990s and indeed even in some ‘new’ African countries as well, while there might otherwise have been a universal spread of ‘usurpation’ in the ‘new’ ex-colonised countries which were appearing on the scene.

My new book on the ‘Presidential Republic’ is thus an attempt at mapping out the difficult historical development of the ‘presidential republic’ since it was invented in the United States. The ‘presidential republic’ in its various forms is indeed, it seems to me, a genuine success, once we take into account the fact that decolonisation produced a large number of countries in which the legitimacy of the nation was, to say the least, very limited: what may be the case is that presidents in charge of the executive and in office for a number of years, as the United States constitution stipulated for the first time in the history of mankind, might be gradually the key instrument as a result of which usurpation may no longer periodically prevail.

Jean Blondel is a political scientist in the field of comparative politics. He became Professor of Political Science at the EUI in 1985 and was an External Professor from 1994 to 2000. Prof. Blondel set up the Department of Government at the University of Essex in 1964 and co-founded the European Consortium of Political Research. He was the winner of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science 2004. He has been awarded honoris causa doctorates from the University of Salford, the University of Essex, the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, the University of Turku, the University of Macerata (2007) and the University of Siena (2008).

This is a guest post by Csaba Nikolenyi of the Department of Political Science, Concordia University

In my newly released book on Institutional Design and Party Government in Post-Communist Europe (Oxford University Press), I devote a chapter to the assessment of the relationship between the rules of indirect presidential elections and divided government. In democracies, where the chief executive is elected directly by the voters, the notion of divided government refers to split partisan control of the executive and legislative branches. In democracies with indirectly elected presidents, however, the notion of divided government is much less explored. In my study, I do not approach the question of presidential choice and divided government from the perspective of the head of state; instead, my interest is in understanding how particular institutional conditions help, or not, the governing majority of parties to acquire control over the presidency where the constitution provides for an indirectly elected head of states.

Among the ten post-communist EU member states, there are four that had indirect presidential elections as of 2010: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Latvia. Since then, the number has dropped to three as a result of the Czech Republic having adopted a constitutional amendment that made the presidency a directly elected office in 2012. I find that in all four cases the rules of the game, specifically the congruence of the presidential election process with the selection of the prime minister, has systematically affected whether the incumbent government coalition of parties will capture the presidency or not. In Hungary and Latvia the rules of winning both the legislature and the executive favor the majority coalition in government. As a result, we tend to see few instances of divided partisan control over the two branches. In contrast, the presidential election rules in the Czech Republic, until 2012, and in Estonia, make it very difficult for the governing coalition to do so: in the former case the selection of the president required bicameral assent, and, in the latter case the winning candidate needs a qualified 2/3 majority in the unicameral Riigikogu. As a result, divided government has been a more frequent outcome in these latter cases.

Do these differences matter? After all, conventional wisdom has it that indirectly elected heads of state tend to have more of a symbolic role than effective political power. I suggest the contrary. Margit Tavits has convincingly shown that presidential power is not always and directly a function of the way in which the chief executive is chosen. At times, an indirectly elected head of state can wield more power over parliament, and political life in general, than a directly elected one depending on factors such as the prevailing balance of powers among parties, personal assets, and, very importantly the formal powers of the office. In the context of East Central Europe, for example, Vaclav Klaus, former (indirectly elected) president of the Czech Republic, was well known for his ability to wield power far beyond what many other directly elected presidents in the region could. In short, it does matter who wins an indirectly contested presidency and, therefore, the rules of the game are very important.

The process of finding the next head of state can be in and of itself an important factor that either supports the institutionalization of the democratic system or paralyzes it. Slovakia abolished the indirectly elected presidency after multiple rounds of balloting in 1998 failed to produce a winning candidate leaving the office vacant for six months and creating considerable political and constitutional turmoil. Similarly, the election of Vaclav Klaus in 2003 was the end product of a prolonged sequence of three rounds of ballots that left the Czech Republic paralyzed for two months. In addition to producing divided government, Klaus’ eventual victory also led to continued acrimony within the ranks of the governing coalition. In fact, it was during the 2003 presidential election process that serious calls in favor of moving to a direct presidential election, as Slovakia had done a few years prior, surfaced. The case of Latvia shows that even a simple majority requirement, that should favor the candidate of the governing coalition, may not be sufficient to generate a straightforward presidential election if the party system is too fragmented: in 1999 it took six rounds of balloting in the Saeima to find the winning candidate, Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

All of this leads to a specific recommendation that institutional designers may take to heart. Juan Linz famously argued that presidentialism, i.e. having a powerful directly elected head of state, is perilous for a new democracy for several reasons including the divisive zero-sum nature of the presidential election. I argue that an indirectly elected presidency may be just as divisive and perilous for a new democracy unless the rules of the game are planned carefully. If the constitution calls for an indirectly elected presidency it is best to have such rules in place that will keep the number of rounds, and the possibility of a protracted or failed balloting, to a minimum. Having a presidential election rule in place that requires the winning candidate to have a special qualified majority tends to exacerbate political divisions in two ways: i) they tend to lead to divided government and conflict between the legislative majority and the head of state; ii) and they increase the likelihood of protracted or failed votes. The current political crisis in Lebanon, where the legislature has failed to elect a new president after thirteen rounds of voting at the time of writing, is a stark reminder of the negative political consequences of such rules in a different part of the world. Simple majority rules allowing for limited rounds to elect the head of state may reinforce the political power of the governing majority by reducing the likelihood of divided government. As such, they lead to greater concentration of power than qualified majority election rules do. Nonetheless, they lead to smoother, more efficient and more predictable outcomes that reduce the strain on the institutional structures of a new democracy.

Csaba Nikolenyi received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2000 and was hired by Concordia University the same year. His research focuses on the comparative study of political parties, electoral systems and legislatures in post-communist democracies as well as on the political systems of Israel and India. He was former English Co-Editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science (2006-11). He served as Code Administrator in the Faculty of Arts and Science between 2009 and 2011 and as Chair of the Department of Political Science between 2011 and 2014. Currently, he is the Director of the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies. Dr. Nikolenyi has published extensively in comparative politics journals and has authored two books: Minority Government in India (Routledge 210) and Institutional Design and Party Government in Post-Communist Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2014). He was a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007-8) and the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University (2012).

This is the consolidated version of three guest posts by Professor John Carey. The posts are based on the keynote address that he gave to the Conference on Coalitional Presidentialism at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, on May 2, 2014.

Presidentialism 25 Years After Linz

Does constitutional regime type affect outcomes we care about? One of the most influential answers to that question was offered by Juan Linz about 25 years ago. At the time, most of Latin America was emerging from long stretches of military authoritarian rule. Politicians, activists, and academics were asking whether anything could be done to minimize the risk of repeating the region’s longstanding pattern of democratic breakdowns. I first encountered Linz’s paper on the Perils of Presidentialism, which was circulating in samizdat form in the late 1980s, just as I entered grad school.

I would summarize Linz’s central claim as, “If Latin America had had parliamentarism instead of presidentialism in the mid-20th Century, it might have avoided Pinochet’s regime in Chile, 20 years of military dictatorship in Brazil, Argentina’s Dirty War, Operation Condor (which pioneered the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ before that term was ever dreamed up), and a host of other catastrophes.” As a new grad student, this struck me as an incredibly exciting proposition – that if we could just get the formal rules right, we could avoid incalculable injustice, violence, and suffering. What more important challenge could political science take on than to figure out whether this was actually right? Could we figure out how to engineer constitutions to minimize the risk, even on the margin, of democratic breakdowns, and the parade of horrors that can follow?

With the wave of democratizations cresting in Latin America, and building in sub-Saharan Africa and throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, it was a no-brainer that the survival of democratic regimes mattered. The effects of non-democracy in all these contexts were so apparent. And Linz made a compelling case that presidentialism undermined democracy. What’s more, of all the ways presidentialism did this, in Linz’s account, stifling the development of strong parties and stable party coalitions was the most important. Democracy didn’t endure on a national level without competition among viable political parties, and the central pillar of Linz’s critique was that parliamentarism fostered strong parties and collective accountability whereas presidentialism undermined them.

Linz’s concern, amplified by Mainwaring’s seminal article on the “difficult combination” of presidentialism and multi-partism, had a huge impact on how a whole generation of scholars studied presidentialism. An avalanche of research followed into whether and how presidentialism affects democratic outcomes, much of which directly challenged Linz’s claims.

What are the central post-Linzian lessons on presidentialism? One is that, Linzian skepticism notwithstanding, presidentialism, and its hybrid cousins that combine popularly elected presidents with some measure of cabinet dependence on parliament, have multiplied far more rapidly than pure parliamentarism in recent decades, to the point where there are now about equal numbers of regimes in each category. The research also showed that presidentialism is not necessarily a recipe for democratic regime collapse, or for the impossibility of stable party coalitions in support of presidents. Along similar lines was the evidence that strong formal authorities for presidents don’t necessarily doom presidential democracy. They might even provide tools for the maintenance of coalition-based presidentialism that is distinct from a Madisonian vision based on conflict between the elected branches.

A lot of the most influential scholarship came out of Brazil, a country that commands our attention for a variety of reasons. One is, of course, is that Brazil is a giant. Another is that it produced a remarkable cohort of scholars, both Brazilian and others, who have focused on Brazilian presidentialism. But as important as any of this is the drama of the story they had to tell. Remember that Brazil was often singled out in the early presidentialism scholarship as an institutional basket case – fragmented, personalistic, clientelistic parties, untrammeled presidential powers. Twenty years ago, it was seen as the perfect presidential storm, yet it transformed into everyone’s darling. For classic liberals, the former dependency theorist who used the presidency to deliver economic stabilization without ignoring poverty was irresistible. For the left, successive Worker’s Party presidents who extended social welfare programs and oversaw measurable reductions in economic inequality looked even better.

But if the evolving accounts of Brazilian presidentialism presented challenges to Linz, the post-Linzian comparative scholarship also provided support for a number of his original claims. Presidential democracies do operate differently from parliamentary ones on a number of counts. Legislative parties and coalitions exhibit lower voting unity under presidentialism than under parliamentarism. Presidents have lower “batting averages” than do parliamentary executives in getting their policy initiatives approved as law. There are more broken campaign promises and less ‘mandate accountability’ under presidentialism than under parliamentarism.

So is it possible to size up the progress in the study of presidentialism? What approaches have provided the most traction? I think the advances beyond Linz followed from two key shifts in how scholars of comparative institutions approached the study of presidential systems, but that each of those shifts has brought its own set of limitations and challenges.

One shift was the increasing appreciation of the problems that omitted variables, and endogeneity, present for the comparative study of institutions. Jose Cheibub’s focus on presidentialism in the aftermath of military dictatorships was a huge advance here, demonstrating that, planted on similar soil to parliamentary regimes, presidential democracies were not more likely to collapse – but that the soil conditions where presidentialism takes root are systematically less hospitable to democracy. Robert Elgie’s efforts to parse the impact of variants of semi-presidentialism on regime collapse were similarly exemplary. (And I, for one, am sympathetic to the argument that divided control over the cabinet encourages regime crises.)

Lurking behind the whole question of whether and how regime type might matter to democratic performance was a question Adam Przeworski posed in a paper about ten years ago called “Is the science of comparative politics possible?” The point – not really new then, and even more familiar by now – was that institutions are the products of context, and the array of factors encompassed by the word “context” here inevitably shapes the outcomes we care about – stability, democracy, prosperity, equality, justice, security, public goods provision, etc. Przeworski’s concern, of course, just foreshadowed the “identificationist” wave that was about to wash over our discipline.

We have to ask: Can presidentialism research respond to changing expectations and standards for inference that the identificationists demand? I’m not asking this question in a kind of rhetorical build-up to a big reveal. I honestly cannot think of a research agenda in political science that presents bigger challenges for identification and inference than the study of how constitutional regime type at the national level affects the quality of democracy. I don’t have a solution, but it would require an ostrich-like capacity for denial not to acknowledge the problem in a review of this sort.

The other key post-Linzian shift was the influence in research on comparative presidentialism of theories of legislative politics initially developed in studies of parliamentary democracy and of the US Congress. The list of names here is long – and includes Tsebelis, Laver, Shepsle, Schofield, Strom, Huber, Krehbiel, Cox, McCubbins, Feddersen, Diermeier, and others. I won’t risk tedium by rehearsing the long list of studies that have applied or adapted their theories by testing them against evidence from presidential regimes. What I want to do, instead, is to raise a warning flag that we have, I think, occasionally prioritized the theories as objects of our research over more basic questions about the quality of democracy – the sort of questions Linz would not have lost sight of.

In the last decade, I have reviewed more manuscripts than I care to recall that stated their central goals as “filling gaps” in the empirical examination of existing theories. Let me suggest that when we find ourselves describing our motivation this way, it’s time for a little introspection. I’m not without blame here. I’ve spent plenty of time deep in the weeds of legislative roll calls or district-level election returns, parsing data for evidence to support hypotheses the fascination of which escapes most of my colleagues – and reviewers – never mind my parents, siblings, or children.

I’m not saying all of our research needs to reveal how to prevent the next Dirty War. Shedding light on the factors that tip the balance of influence between executives and legislatures in one direction or another is a time-honored vocation. But Madison and Montesquieu and Locke all made the case that the balance of powers mattered because it affected the likelihood of tyranny. They persuaded their audiences that the separation of powers could affect outcomes that everyone recognized as important. And remember that, for Linz, too, tyranny was front and center. My worry is that, for all the theoretical advances in the study of presidentialism since Linz, we have too often lost sight of why we, or our audience, should care.

In an article published just recently in Democratization, Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy Power emphasized why we should care, even if we now know (or are reasonably confident) that presidentialism does not necessarily pave a straight road to tyranny. They write: “Twenty years of research have shown presidentialism to be remarkably durable, and in particular its multiparty variant has vastly over-performed relative to early predictions … [However, the authors go on to wonder whether] … The very same presidential tools that enhance governability may also undermine accountability.” I agree that the governability—accountability trade-off is what scholars of presidentialism should be studying, and I want to highlight some recent studies of presidentialism that imagine new ways to think about accountability – ways that I think would be relatively easy to explain to your aunt at Thanksgiving, or if you got interviewed by Terry Gross or Melvyn Bragg.

In an article forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, “The Successor Factor: Electoral Accountability in Presidential Democracies,” Ignacio de Ferrari builds on the tradition (from Powell, to Stokes, to Samuels & Hellwig) of measuring accountability as the ability of voters to reward or punish an incumbent, governing party for economic performance. De Ferrari codes presidential candidates from governing parties as either incumbents (who were eligible to run again), successors (candidates anointed by outgoing incumbents), or non-successors (unconnected to incumbent presidents).

De Ferrari shows that the link between economic performance and the incumbent party candidate’s electoral fate varies systematically with incumbent/successor/non-successor status. This isn’t shocking – indeed, it would be pretty surprising if this were not the case. But then consider that de Ferrari finds no relationship between the economic performance of the incumbent government and the status of the candidates the president’s party nominated. That is, economically successful presidents were no more likely than unsuccessful ones to be able to anoint their successors. These are puzzles, and they suggest that the factors that determine whether we are in the world of high or low accountability (at least as measured by electoral rewards for economic growth) are opaque in many presidential systems.

Consider also a couple of papers by Ryan Carlin and Shane Singh, also based on data from Latin America. In one, “Executive Power and Economic Accountability,” the authors show that the stronger the constitutional and partisan powers of the president in a given country, the stronger is the relationship between a survey respondent’s evaluation of the economy and her evaluation of the president. Again, not surprising – maybe even reassuring – this suggests that citizens, in the aggregate, adjust their expectations for presidential performance according to the authorities their president wields. Yet in an article forthcoming in Political Research Quarterly, “Happy Medium, Happy Citizens: Presidential Power and Democratic Regime Support,” Singh and Carlin show that respondents’ satisfaction with the performance of democracy in their country is non-monotonically connected to those same formal authorities. The conditions that foster the tightest possible bond between economic performance and presidential approval are not the same ones that foster the greatest satisfaction with democracy more generally. So accountability in presidential democracies is not an easy animal to track and hunt.

What I’m suggesting is close attention to how we assess accountability, about what citizens want from their democracies, and what those democracies ought to deliver. If GDP growth is our indicator of good economic stewardship, then we should fear for accountability when a political system does not appear to reward growth. But maybe citizen satisfaction, measured in surveys, is a more appropriate measure of good performance. Or some measure of agreement between public support for policies and their rate of adoption? Or something else altogether?

n a spasm of curiosity, I collected data on regime type (presidential, parliamentary, or semi-presidential hybrid) from Robert Elgie’s website for 131 countries with populations above 1,000,000. Of these 41 are parliamentary, 43 are presidential, and 47 are hybrids.97 of the 131 (34, 33, and 30, respectively) had Polity scores of 5 or higher in the most recent year. Then I collected data from the World Bank, Polity IV, the United Nations, and Transparency International on the most recent annual measures on a wide range of regime performance and policy outputs that I think any sentient observer ought to care about: levels of democracy and stability, poverty, economic inequality, taxation, corruption, physical insecurity, and the rule of law.

Parliamentary regimes are, on the whole, wealthier than presidential ones and than hybrids. This graph shows the distributions of Purchasing Power Parity across the regime types:

A lot of the performance indicators I’m going to look at here are correlated with national wealth, the distribution of which is skewed and the effects of which are likely subject to diminishing returns. So the graphs that follow will be scatterplots, and some fitted plots, of various outcomes we should care about against a log transformation of per capita wealth. Presidential regimes are marked by red Xs, parliamentary regimes by green dots, and hybrid regimes by blue triangles. We can look quickly at the scatters and size up whether one regime type or another is over-performing or under-performing, relative to others at the same level of wealth.

Looking first at democracy levels, as measured by Polity IV. Wealthier countries are more democratic, but there’s no clear pattern of any of our three regime types systematically over- or under-performing.

The same is true for regime stability, as measured by the World Bank’s Stability Perceptions Index, which reflects“perceptions of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including politically-motivated violence and terrorism.”

So – so far, my crude, cross-sectional snapshots are consistent with the more systematic evidence presented by Cheibub and others that presidentialism, per se, is not inconsistent with democratic stability. But when we look at some further indicators of regime performance – again, with my crude measures – the picture for presidentialism is less encouraging.

Taxation is the cornerstone of government capacity to deliver public goods. We know that wealthier states tend to tax at higher rates, and of course parliamentary regimes are better represented at that end of the scale. Nevertheless, if we look at the distribution of regimes above and below the best linear fit line, parliamentary regimes are about twice as likely to be over-performers than under-performers, and for presidential regimes, the reverse is true.

In this plot, the green line shows the linear fit for the relationship between per capita wealth and taxation for presidential regimes, and the blue line shows parliamentary and hybrids pooled, and we can see that the positive relationship is driven by the latter set.

We might ask whether the distinct patterns for presidential and other regimes are driven by the inclusion of non-democratic cases, but dropping all regimes with Polity scores below 5 only strengthens it. Wealthier presidential democracies actually tax marginally less as a share of GDP than do poorer ones; the reverse is true among parliamentary and hybrid regimes.

Maybe the tax share of GDP is not an ideal measure of government accountability. Let’s consider some other things that are affected by government policies in pursuit of public welfare. The next graph shows Gini indices of economic inequality plotted against per capita wealth.

There’s substantial dispersion but, on the whole, wealthier societies are slightly less unequal than poorer ones. But again, look at the relative distribution of presidential, as opposed to parliamentary regimes above and below the best fit line. Or easier, here are the linear fits for presidential regimes and for the pooled set of parliamentary and hybrids.

Economic inequality rises with wealth among presidential regimes whereas it declines in the others. In an article entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” forthcoming in Perspective on Politics, but already lighting up the wonkosphre, Gilens and Page make the case that there is massive elite bias in influence over public policy outcomes in the United States. This graph raises the question: Does the Gilens and Page result generalize beyond the United States to other presidential systems?

If we look at poverty rather than economic inequality, we don’t get as dramatic a difference between regime types – richer countries tend to have lower poverty rates across the categories – but presidential regimes again under-perform on poverty mitigation.

There is a discernible difference between presidential regimes and others, with poverty rates about 10% higher across the range of income levels.

Another conventional indicator of government accountability is corruption, so let’s take a look at Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. (Remember, higher TI scores represent less perceived corruption among its survey respondents.)

The pattern here is a little less stark, but the fitted plots suggest that, as countries increase in per capita wealth, the rate of improvement on corruption is flatter among presidential regimes than among parliamentary systems and hybrids.

We get a similar kind of pattern if we consider another key government function – guaranteeing individual physical security. The data here show homicide rates from the comprehensive United Nations report released last month. Again, there’s a general pattern of greater security in richer countries, but the rate of improvement with wealth is flatter among presidential regimes than the others.

Finally, we can look at the less concrete, but more catholic conceptions of Rule of Law, or of Accountability, compiled by the World Bank as Governance Indicators. These are based on a combination of survey responses and expert assessments. On both their Rule of Law index, and their Accountability index, we see the same familiar pattern, with improvement across wealth levels in presidential regimes lagging that in parliamentarism and the hybrids.

I want to emphasize that these scatterplots are just suggestive. I collected the data because, as I thought about what we’ve learned about presidentialism since Linz, I went back to Linz’s essay, and then reviewed much of the literature on presidentialism that followed. In part, I found myself conducting the inevitable scorekeeping exercise. Linz appears to have been more right about some things than others. (By the way, when I’m done playing, I’d be happy to have a record even close to his.) But when you read Linz, why he cared about regime type is never in doubt. So much outstanding research has followed Linz. My words of encouragement as we continue this work is that our scholarship should be as clear as Linz’s was with regard to why we care about the phenomena we study.

John M. Carey is the Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences, and the chair of the Government Department, at Dartmouth College. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of 5 books and of over 50 academic articles on democratic institutions. Research, datasets, and further information about his work are available on his website at http://sites.dartmouth.edu/jcarey/

This is the consolidated version of two guest posts by José Cheibub, Boeschenstein Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In this post, I discuss the role of political institutions in democratic consolidation. Regarding the forms of democratic government, I like to think that there are essentially two: those with a separation of powers and those that require assembly confidence. The first are typical presidential democracies, systems with constitutions that prescribe a fixed term in office for both a popularly and independently elected president and a congress. The second are the parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies, in which the government must be at least tolerated by a parliamentary majority in order to exist.

I will therefore focus on the effect of political institutions, whether parliamentary or presidential, on democratic consolidation. I start by briefly reviewing the earlier debate on the relationship between democratic form of government and consolidation. I then discuss what I see as two challenges we face today to advance the study of democratic consolidation: its proper definition and conceptualization, an to understand how the phenomena of democratic breakdown and consolidation changed since we first started to think about them. I conclude with a few remarks on the kind of advice political scientists can give regarding the best constitutional form for the consolidation of democracy.

The impact of separation of powers or assembly confidence on democratic consolidation is no longer at the center of the democratization research agenda. Probably everyone is familiar with the argument, first developed by Juan Linz, according to which presidential institutions are likely to lead to crises that may ultimately cause the breakdown of democracies.[i] Although Linz offered more than one reason for the observed negative correlation between presidentialism and democracy, most important, in my view, was his argument about incentives for coalition formation. This argument was also the most fully developed in subsequent studies. His reasoning was as follows: presidential institutions fail to generate incentives for cooperation among individual politicians, among parties and between the legislative and executive powers. Because presidentialism provides no incentives for inter-branch cooperation, presidential democracies are characterized by frequent minority governments as well as conflict and deadlocks between the government and the legislature. Because presidential regimes lack a constitutional principle that can be invoked to resolve conflicts between the executive and the legislature, such as the vote of no confidence in parliamentary democracies, minority presidents and deadlock provide incentives for actors to search for extra-constitutional means of resolving differences. As a consequence, presidential democracies become more prone to instability and eventual death.

Thus, according to Linz, presidential institutions are simply not conducive to governments capable of handling the explosive issues that are central to the new democracies in the developing world. These issues make governing difficult under any circumstances. Governing becomes almost impossible when the institutional setup is likely to generate governments with weak legislative support as well as parties and politicians whose dominant strategy is to act independently from one another. Given the lack of constitutional solutions to the crises that are almost inevitable in these countries, political actors have no choice but to appeal to those with the means to resolve their differences, even if at the price of democracy itself.

Here is not the place for rehashing the debate around these ideas. Let me simply say that Juan Linz’s view of the negative impact of presidentialism on democratization was critically examined along two main lines. The first focused on the fact that parliamentary democracies were not altogether immune to the institutional crises that were supposed to characterize presidential ones. The second sought to show that the sequence of events that would lead to the breakdown of presidential democracies did not materialize with the frequency implied by the argument. Consequently, if the relationship between presidentialism and democratic breakdown is causal, the mechanism might not be the one postulated by Linz.

Of course, the discussion around the “perils of presidentialism” did not represent the last word in the debate about the impact of forms of government on democratic consolidation. This question still generates considerable interest, as it should. The correlation between presidential institutions and democratic breakdown is still a reality and hence the intuitive arguments that have been made connecting the two still resonate. But to move forward it may be helpful to address some unresolved issues while recognizing how the political reality has changed since Linz’s theory was formulated. Even though not a long time has passed since that moment, it is fair to say that the features of many of the cases we are confronted with today are quite different from the ones confronted by Linz.

The original argument about the detrimental effects of presidentialism for democratic consolidation must be understood in the context of the virtual disappearance of democracy from Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1960 and 1975, almost every Latin American country experienced a democratic breakdown. Most of these democracies collapsed in the hands of the military, who inaugurated what O’Donnell called a new type of dictatorship – the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime. As a matter of fact, during the Cold War, the vast majority of democracies collapsed as the result of a military coup, in a pattern that, at least superficially, corroborated Linz’s view of a conflict between a fixed-term executive who did not have the support of a majority in congress.

Democratic breakdown happens nowadays in a very different way. Institutionalized militaries cannot be counted on to intervene into politics and take the reins of government from the hands of civilian politicians. If democracies fail to consolidate today, authoritarian regimes that replace them are more likely to be led by civilians, often the elected incumbent who, by a process of overt and covert manipulation, progressively removes the conditions necessary for competitive elections to occur in the future. To use the terminology employed by Adam Przeworski and his co-authors,[ii] transitions to authoritarianism after the Cold War are more likely to be “from above” and occur at the hands of the incumbent. They are likely to violate two of the three conditions which the above mentioned authors identified as necessary for a democracy to exist: “ex ante uncertainty,” namely, the requirement that electoral outcomes are not pre-determined, and “repeatability,” that is, the requirement that democratic incumbents hold competitive elections such as the ones that brought them into office.[iii]

Thus, if it is true that there is a correlation between presidentialism and the recent failures of democratic consolidation (something that has not been established yet, as far as I know), and if it is true that these episodes of failure rarely if at all involve a military coup, we need to formulate new explanatory hypotheses. What is it about presidentialism that may lead to the entrenchment of incumbents in power? Conversely, which characteristics of parliamentary institutions might prevent such entrenchment?

One thing is sure, namely, that the Linzian approach to these questions will not take us far. The reason is that this approach is focused on the problem of legislative support for the executive, that is, on how parliamentarism virtually assures that such support is present, and (multiparty) presidentialism virtually assures that it will be lacking. However, some of the contemporary cases suggest the opposite: democracy may be “saved” by the fact that the government does not have strong support in the legislature and it may be threatened in situations when the executive enjoys sufficient backing of the legislature to shut off the opposition.

Take a few recent examples. In Slovakia, Vladimír Mečiar was hampered in his authoritarian ambitions by repeated defections from his coalition, which eventually resulted in a vote of no-confidence in 1994 and the failure to form governments in 1998. This happened in spite of Mečiar’s control of a plurality of legislative seats. In Hungary, on the other hand, the overwhelming legislative support for Prime Minister Victor Orbán allowed him and his party to introduce changes that are widely seen as non-democratic. Similarly, as Sebastian Saiegh shows using an example of the fall of Bolivian president Sánchez Lozada in 2003,[iv] the danger for democratic consolidation posed by an unconstitutional transfer of power should be attributed to situations which are in their nature opposite to deadlocks. As Saiegh suggests, in some circumstances the government may actually govern too much. Consequently, what threatens democracy is not so much that there is a deadlock between a constitutionally irremovable president and legislature but the fact that the two are aligned and can change the status quo in a direction that may suit their interests but not those of democracy. Deadlocks and minority governments may be precisely what save democracy from being suffocated by aspiring autocrats. If this conclusion reminds the reader of Madison and his view about separation of powers, it is not a mere coincidence.

Thus, the correlation between presidential institutions and (failure of) democratic consolidation in the contemporary world, if it exists at all, should not be considered intuitive and explainable in terms of hypotheses generated from a framework that sees the lack of legislative support for presidents as the crux of the problem. That framework was generated with a specific set of historical examples in mind, and it became popular in the context of the debt crisis in Latin America and the concerns about the ability of governments in the region to implement structural policies that were at the time considered necessary. While implementation of these policies required the preference alignment of the executive and the legislature, all countries operated under a constitution that provided no such guarantee. By contrast with presidentialism, assembly confidence was seeing as the institutional mechanism that assured support of legislative majority to the executive and parliamentarism as the form of government that would prevent the failure of the new democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe. We know where this story went: few democracies, parliamentary or presidential, failed in the way that was then expected. Perhaps this is the fact that requires explanation.

What kind of constitution is best suited to help consolidate democracy? Unfortunately, in my view, some scholars believe that there is a clear answer to this question and are not shy to advocate their views. For instance, in an opinion piece published in July 2013, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, stated that the failure of the military rulers who had just taken power in Egypt to replace presidentialism with “a European-style parliamentary system,” “virtually guarantees a repetition of the tragic events of the past year.”[v] Furthermore, as he argues counterfactually, the adoption of a parliamentary constitution after Mubarak’s departure “could well have avoided the current upheaval and bloodshed in the first place.” The reason, according to him, is that “the presidency is a winner-take-all office,” which may be suitable for a country such as the United States, “where well-organized parties contend for the prize,” but “is a recipe for tyranny in places like Egypt, where Islamists have powerful organizational advantages in delivering the vote.” Although Ackerman stands out in the forcefulness and clarity with which he defends a constitutional overhaul in countries that adopt presidentialism, he certainly does not hold this opinion alone. Yet, we may ask: is this view warranted?

This kind of advice is based on generic and one-sided arguments, which are supported by scant historical and statistical evidence: isolated regime crises (Chile in 1973 is favorite, with Egypt beginning to trail behind) and references to the correlation between presidentialism and regime breakdown, as if correlation was evidence of causation. (But we know better than this!). Moreover, parliamentarism and presidentialism are very broad constitutional frameworks: as recent research has demonstrated, they can be configured in an infinite number of ways; they interact with other, small and large, institutional features of the political system; and, of course, they interact with non-institutional factors, unique to the country where they are being adopted. This last point is particularly relevant for Egypt. It is possible that Ackeman is right and a parliamentary constitution may do the trick in Egypt and allow for the peaceful processing of conflicts between Islamists and secularists. On the other hand, we have good reasons to believe that, given the nature of its military, the main problem in Egypt at this point is far from being institutional; perhaps given the presence of such an actor, any kind of constitutional arrangement would have failed. Thus, to reduce parliamentarism and presidentialism to one essential feature, to look at specific situations from the lens provided by this essential feature, and offer constitutional advice on the basis of this exercise requires courage, the courage of fools who believe that they have successfully found the solution to the problem that has eluded everyone else.

I thus end with a note which suggests more humbleness than confidence in our ability to provide positive advice of the sort given by Ackerman. The vast majority of studies have failed to establish convincingly that there exists a causal relationship between the form of government and democracy. Consequently, unless in some specific case there is a broad consensus across the political spectrum about the need for change, it is not certain that the benefit of adopting a new type of constitution will outweigh the costs of implementing it.

[i] Juan J. Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference?” in Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., The Failure of Presidential Democracy: The Case of Latin America, edited by (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

[iii] The one that is not violated is “ex post certainty,” namely the assurance that whoever wins the election will take office. Note that the “alternation” rule introduced by Przeworski et al. to operationalize the three conditions of democracy speaks directly to the problems related to the measurement of incumbent-caused subversions of democracy.

Here is a list of presidential, semi-presidential, parliamentary, and other regimes.

The two basic definitional criteria are the method of selection of the head of state and whether or not the cabinet is responsible to the legislature.

The countries are classed taxonomically on the basis of their current constitution. The definitions are not designed to capture political practice. They are designed to capture constitutional rules in a way that distinguishes reliably between different constitutional forms.

Presidentialism (i.e. popular presidential election) with no PM but cabinet accountability
Zambia

Presidentialism (i.e. popular presidential election) but president accountability to legislature but not cabinet
Gambia

Parliamentarism (i.e election of the president by the legislature) with no PM and no head of state/govt accountability and no cabinet accountability
Eritrea, Micronesia, Suriname, Switzerland

Parliamentarism (i.e election of the president by the legislature) with no PM but head of state/govt accountability and cabinet accountability
Botswana, Cuba, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, South Africa

Parliamentarism (i.e election of the president by the legislature) with head of state, PM and cabinet accountability
Vietnam

This is the second of three guest posts by Professor John Carey. The posts are based on the keynote address that he gave to the Conference on Coalitional Presidentialism at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, on May 2, 2014.

Presidentialism 25 Years After Linz

In a spasm of curiosity, I collected data on regime type (presidential, parliamentary, or semi-presidential hybrid) from Robert Elgie’s website for 131 countries with populations above 1,000,000. Of these 41 are parliamentary, 43 are presidential, and 47 are hybrids.97 of the 131 (34, 33, and 30, respectively) had Polity scores of 5 or higher in the most recent year. Then I collected data from the World Bank, Polity IV, the United Nations, and Transparency International on the most recent annual measures on a wide range of regime performance and policy outputs that I think any sentient observer ought to care about: levels of democracy and stability, poverty, economic inequality, taxation, corruption, physical insecurity, and the rule of law.

Parliamentary regimes are, on the whole, wealthier than presidential ones and than hybrids. This graph shows the distributions of Purchasing Power Parity across the regime types:

A lot of the performance indicators I’m going to look at here are correlated with national wealth, the distribution of which is skewed and the effects of which are likely subject to diminishing returns. So the graphs that follow will be scatterplots, and some fitted plots, of various outcomes we should care about against a log transformation of per capita wealth. Presidential regimes are marked by red Xs, parliamentary regimes by green dots, and hybrid regimes by blue triangles. We can look quickly at the scatters and size up whether one regime type or another is over-performing or under-performing, relative to others at the same level of wealth.

Looking first at democracy levels, as measured by Polity IV. Wealthier countries are more democratic, but there’s no clear pattern of any of our three regime types systematically over- or under-performing.

The same is true for regime stability, as measured by the World Bank’s Stability Perceptions Index, which reflects“perceptions of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including politically-motivated violence and terrorism.”

So – so far, my crude, cross-sectional snapshots are consistent with the more systematic evidence presented by Cheibub and others that presidentialism, per se, is not inconsistent with democratic stability. But when we look at some further indicators of regime performance – again, with my crude measures – the picture for presidentialism is less encouraging.

Taxation is the cornerstone of government capacity to deliver public goods. We know that wealthier states tend to tax at higher rates, and of course parliamentary regimes are better represented at that end of the scale. Nevertheless, if we look at the distribution of regimes above and below the best linear fit line, parliamentary regimes are about twice as likely to be over-performers than under-performers, and for presidential regimes, the reverse is true.

In this plot, the green line shows the linear fit for the relationship between per capita wealth and taxation for presidential regimes, and the blue line shows parliamentary and hybrids pooled, and we can see that the positive relationship is driven by the latter set.

We might ask whether the distinct patterns for presidential and other regimes are driven by the inclusion of non-democratic cases, but dropping all regimes with Polity scores below 5 only strengthens it. Wealthier presidential democracies actually tax marginally less as a share of GDP than do poorer ones; the reverse is true among parliamentary and hybrid regimes.

Maybe the tax share of GDP is not an ideal measure of government accountability. Let’s consider some other things that are affected by government policies in pursuit of public welfare. The next graph shows Gini indices of economic inequality plotted against per capita wealth.

There’s substantial dispersion but, on the whole, wealthier societies are slightly less unequal than poorer ones. But again, look at the relative distribution of presidential, as opposed to parliamentary regimes above and below the best fit line. Or easier, here are the linear fits for presidential regimes and for the pooled set of parliamentary and hybrids.

Economic inequality rises with wealth among presidential regimes whereas it declines in the others. In an article entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” forthcoming in Perspective on Politics, but already lighting up the wonkosphre, Gilens and Page make the case that there is massive elite bias in influence over public policy outcomes in the United States. This graph raises the question: Does the Gilens and Page result generalize beyond the United States to other presidential systems?

If we look at poverty rather than economic inequality, we don’t get as dramatic a difference between regime types – richer countries tend to have lower poverty rates across the categories – but presidential regimes again under-perform on poverty mitigation.

There is a discernible difference between presidential regimes and others, with poverty rates about 10% higher across the range of income levels.

Another conventional indicator of government accountability is corruption, so let’s take a look at Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. (Remember, higher TI scores represent less perceived corruption among its survey respondents.)

The pattern here is a little less stark, but the fitted plots suggest that, as countries increase in per capita wealth, the rate of improvement on corruption is flatter among presidential regimes than among parliamentary systems and hybrids.

We get a similar kind of pattern if we consider another key government function – guaranteeing individual physical security. The data here show homicide rates from the comprehensive United Nations report released last month. Again, there’s a general pattern of greater security in richer countries, but the rate of improvement with wealth is flatter among presidential regimes than the others.

Finally, we can look at the less concrete, but more catholic conceptions of Rule of Law, or of Accountability, compiled by the World Bank as Governance Indicators. These are based on a combination of survey responses and expert assessments. On both their Rule of Law index, and their Accountability index, we see the same familiar pattern, with improvement across wealth levels in presidential regimes lagging that in parliamentarism and the hybrids.

I want to emphasize that these scatterplots are just suggestive. I collected the data because, as I thought about what we’ve learned about presidentialism since Linz, I went back to Linz’s essay, and then reviewed much of the literature on presidentialism that followed. In part, I found myself conducting the inevitable scorekeeping exercise. Linz appears to have been more right about some things than others. (By the way, when I’m done playing, I’d be happy to have a record even close to his.) But when you read Linz, why he cared about regime type is never in doubt. So much outstanding research has followed Linz. My words of encouragement as we continue this work is that our scholarship should be as clear as Linz’s was with regard to why we care about the phenomena we study.

John M. Carey is the Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences, and the chair of the Government Department, at Dartmouth College. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of 5 books and of over 50 academic articles on democratic institutions. Research, datasets, and further information about his work are available on his website at http://sites.dartmouth.edu/jcarey/

This is the second of three guest posts by Professor John Carey. The posts are based on the keynote address that he gave to the Conference on Coalitional Presidentialism at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, on May 2, 2014.

Presidentialism 25 Years After Linz

Is it possible to size up the progress in the study of presidentialism? What approaches have provided the most traction? I think the advances beyond Linz followed from two key shifts in how scholars of comparative institutions approached the study of presidential systems, but that each of those shifts has brought its own set of limitations and challenges.

One shift was the increasing appreciation of the problems that omitted variables, and endogeneity, present for the comparative study of institutions. Jose Cheibub’s focus on presidentialism in the aftermath of military dictatorships was a huge advance here, demonstrating that, planted on similar soil to parliamentary regimes, presidential democracies were not more likely to collapse – but that the soil conditions where presidentialism takes root are systematically less hospitable to democracy. Robert Elgie’s efforts to parse the impact of variants of semi-presidentialism on regime collapse were similarly exemplary. (And I, for one, am sympathetic to the argument that divided control over the cabinet encourages regime crises.)

Lurking behind the whole question of whether and how regime type might matter to democratic performance was a question Adam Przeworski posed in a paper about ten years ago called “Is the science of comparative politics possible?” The point – not really new then, and even more familiar by now – was that institutions are the products of context, and the array of factors encompassed by the word “context” here inevitably shapes the outcomes we care about – stability, democracy, prosperity, equality, justice, security, public goods provision, etc. Przeworski’s concern, of course, just foreshadowed the “identificationist” wave that was about to wash over our discipline.

We have to ask: Can presidentialism research respond to changing expectations and standards for inference that the identificationists demand? I’m not asking this question in a kind of rhetorical build-up to a big reveal. I honestly cannot think of a research agenda in political science that presents bigger challenges for identification and inference than the study of how constitutional regime type at the national level affects the quality of democracy. I don’t have a solution, but it would require an ostrich-like capacity for denial not to acknowledge the problem in a review of this sort.

The other key post-Linzian shift was the influence in research on comparative presidentialism of theories of legislative politics initially developed in studies of parliamentary democracy and of the US Congress. The list of names here is long – and includes Tsebelis, Laver, Shepsle, Schofield, Strom, Huber, Krehbiel, Cox, McCubbins, Feddersen, Diermeier, and others. I won’t risk tedium by rehearsing the long list of studies that have applied or adapted their theories by testing them against evidence from presidential regimes. What I want to do, instead, is to raise a warning flag that we have, I think, occasionally prioritized the theories as objects of our research over more basic questions about the quality of democracy – the sort of questions Linz would not have lost sight of.

In the last decade, I have reviewed more manuscripts than I care to recall that stated their central goals as “filling gaps” in the empirical examination of existing theories. Let me suggest that when we find ourselves describing our motivation this way, it’s time for a little introspection. I’m not without blame here. I’ve spent plenty of time deep in the weeds of legislative roll calls or district-level election returns, parsing data for evidence to support hypotheses the fascination of which escapes most of my colleagues – and reviewers – never mind my parents, siblings, or children.

I’m not saying all of our research needs to reveal how to prevent the next Dirty War. Shedding light on the factors that tip the balance of influence between executives and legislatures in one direction or another is a time-honored vocation. But Madison and Montesquieu and Locke all made the case that the balance of powers mattered because it affected the likelihood of tyranny. They persuaded their audiences that the separation of powers could affect outcomes that everyone recognized as important. And remember that, for Linz, too, tyranny was front and center. My worry is that, for all the theoretical advances in the study of presidentialism since Linz, we have too often lost sight of why we, or our audience, should care.

In an article published just recently in Democratization, Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy Power emphasized why we should care, even if we now know (or are reasonably confident) that presidentialism does not necessarily pave a straight road to tyranny. They write: “Twenty years of research have shown presidentialism to be remarkably durable, and in particular its multiparty variant has vastly over-performed relative to early predictions … [However, the authors go on to wonder whether] … The very same presidential tools that enhance governability may also undermine accountability.” I agree that the governability—accountability trade-off is what scholars of presidentialism should be studying, and I want to highlight some recent studies of presidentialism that imagine new ways to think about accountability – ways that I think would be relatively easy to explain to your aunt at Thanksgiving, or if you got interviewed by Terry Gross or Melvyn Bragg.

In an article forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, “The Successor Factor: Electoral Accountability in Presidential Democracies,” Ignacio de Ferrari builds on the tradition (from Powell, to Stokes, to Samuels & Hellwig) of measuring accountability as the ability of voters to reward or punish an incumbent, governing party for economic performance. De Ferrari codes presidential candidates from governing parties as either incumbents (who were eligible to run again), successors (candidates anointed by outgoing incumbents), or non-successors (unconnected to incumbent presidents).

De Ferrari shows that the link between economic performance and the incumbent party candidate’s electoral fate varies systematically with incumbent/successor/non-successor status. This isn’t shocking – indeed, it would be pretty surprising if this were not the case. But then consider that de Ferrari finds no relationship between the economic performance of the incumbent government and the status of the candidates the president’s party nominated. That is, economically successful presidents were no more likely than unsuccessful ones to be able to anoint their successors. These are puzzles, and they suggest that the factors that determine whether we are in the world of high or low accountability (at least as measured by electoral rewards for economic growth) are opaque in many presidential systems.

Consider also a couple of papers by Ryan Carlin and Shane Singh, also based on data from Latin America. In one, “Executive Power and Economic Accountability,” the authors show that the stronger the constitutional and partisan powers of the president in a given country, the stronger is the relationship between a survey respondent’s evaluation of the economy and her evaluation of the president. Again, not surprising – maybe even reassuring – this suggests that citizens, in the aggregate, adjust their expectations for presidential performance according to the authorities their president wields. Yet in an article forthcoming in Political Research Quarterly, “Happy Medium, Happy Citizens: Presidential Power and Democratic Regime Support,” Singh and Carlin show that respondents’ satisfaction with the performance of democracy in their country is non-monotonically connected to those same formal authorities. The conditions that foster the tightest possible bond between economic performance and presidential approval are not the same ones that foster the greatest satisfaction with democracy more generally. So accountability in presidential democracies is not an easy animal to track and hunt.

What I’m suggesting is close attention to how we assess accountability, about what citizens want from their democracies, and what those democracies ought to deliver. If GDP growth is our indicator of good economic stewardship, then we should fear for accountability when a political system does not appear to reward growth. But maybe citizen satisfaction, measured in surveys, is a more appropriate measure of good performance. Or some measure of agreement between public support for policies and their rate of adoption? Or something else altogether?

To be continued tomorrow.

John M. Carey is the Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences, and the chair of the Government Department, at Dartmouth College. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of 5 books and of over 50 academic articles on democratic institutions. Research, datasets, and further information about his work are available on his website at http://sites.dartmouth.edu/jcarey/